Turbo Coaching you & your Biz

from Soundview Executive Book Summaries 7/14 enhanced by Peter/CXO Wiz4biz

What’s it all about? With numerous words of wisdom for improving yourself, your field, your productivity & your business, coaching experts Brian Tracy & Campbell Fraser present a complete personal coaching program in TurboCoach. Filled with tools, exercises & stories that offer the building blocks of a personal strategic plan, TurboCoach creates a complete foundation on which readers can develop the knowledge, skills, habits & activities that can take them to the next level of business success. The first part of TurboCoach describes a process for helping the reader gain clarity in his or her personal life , then finishes with your business life. Each chapter begins with probing questions that encourage the reader to focus on a specific aspect of him/herself, and ends with an exercise that helps apply the answers to daily life.

Part 1. Your Personal Strategic Plan. The first chapter, “Create Your Personal Strategic Plan,” starts with the questions, “In the past six months, have you given any thought to setting specific career or business goals for yourself?” and “If you have set goals for yourself, do you have a schedule for achieving them?” The chapter ends with an application exercise that includes questions such as, “What is your career or business purpose? Whose lives does your career or business serve?” and “What one goal, if you achieved it, would help you the most in realizing your ideal career or business vision?” By asking these types of questions, and providing the guidance that drives readers to answer them with purpose & direction, the authors help readers focus on their goals and contemplate a broader perspective of themselves.

Part 2. Increase your Productivity, using 11 keys: Pareto’s Principle (the 80-20 Rule), Zero-based thinking, effective Delegation, the power of Leverage, Ricardo’s Law of Comparative Advantage & the Parthenon Principle. This last principle can be summed up in the simple sentence, “Small improvements in multiple areas [Kaizen] can result in large improvements in results.” The authors write, “Like the Parthenon, your career or business is also supported by pillars, each of which is central to its integrity & survival.” If you want a career or business that is built to last, then you must base it on rock-solid principles. As each pillar is strengthened in a small way, the durability of the entire structure changes dramatically. The authors point out that improvements in just 10 % of each of the core systems of a business — sales, service, pricing, promotion, referrals, productivity & profitability — will virtually double the productivity & the profitability of the overall enterprise.

Part 3. Grow Your Business, provides readers with 7 essential strategies to increase revenues in any organization. These are:
1. Make more sales. Expanding your customer base is the best way to do this.
2. Sell more often to existing customers. Look for ways to increase the number of times you sell to an existing customer in any given period.
3. Sell something else. Ask yourself, “What else would my customers buy?”
4. Make larger sales. How might you increase the dollar size of your average sale?
5. Increase your price. Increasing the perceived value of your offering can justify a higher price to your customer.
6. Make more profitable sales. Reducing Costs will increase the profitability & net revenues.
7. Reduce your selling costs. Examining your sales process is the first step to doing this.

Beyond the Magnificent 7. Once this base is in place, the authors describe ways to increase customer satisfaction, build business through referrals, create a marketing plan & create a personal brand. Their laws of personal branding include rules on specialization, leadership, personality, distinctiveness, visibility, congruence & persistence. They explain that the time & energy anyone invests in building a powerful, personal brand will pay huge dividends because people will trust him/her and willingly accept their suggestions and recommendations. While describing how to maximize an organization’s profits, the authors explain the importance of habitually examining the profitability of employees, customers, sales & marketing initiatives, products & markets, and show readers how they can develop the discipline to become an industry leader.

Why We Like This Book. TurboCoach is a lightning-fast read that takes the reader quickly through a purposeful regimen of principles & actions that flow smoothly between idea & implementation. By offering expert advice in an easy-to-use format that is so straightforward that even a casual read offers many personal benefits, the authors have paved a short, straight path to personal & business satisfaction. Why do you like it?